[HN Gopher] Mistral Agents API
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Mistral Agents API
Author : pember
Score : 134 points
Date : 2025-05-27 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Whoever made those embedded videos, here some feedback if you
| want it take it, it's free:
|
| 1) It's really hard to follow some of the videos since you're
| just copy pasting the prompts fr your agents into the chat
| because the output generation comes out and hides the prompts.
| Instead put the prompt text as an overlay/subtitle-like so we
| know what you're doing
|
| 2) The clicking sound of you copy pasting and typing is not ASMR,
| please just mute it next time
|
| 3) Please zoom into the text more, not everyone has 20/20 super
| vision 4K style
| ianhawes wrote:
| 4) Use a clean browser profile so you don't show unrelated
| autocomplete
| threeducks wrote:
| To add to 3): YouTube embedded videos default to 360p for me
| even if I maximize the embedded video on my 4k screen, which is
| completely unreadable. This is probably an attempt by YouTube
| to get viewers to click through to the YouTube website. It is
| probably not in Mistral's best interest to funnel viewers to
| YouTube, so they should use a different video host.
|
| But even at maximum 1080p resolution, the image quality is not
| that great. And while we are at it, the wine-red (#833048) on
| dark-brown (#23231F) syntax highlighting for keyword arguments
| has very poor contrast ratio of around 1.8 to 1:
| https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ which earns a
| rating of "Fail" across the categories normal text, large text
| and UI elements.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I came here to see if anyone else noticed.
|
| Very sloppy job, imo.
|
| It costs next to nothing to come up with a little story and
| have someone on Fiverr narrate it (or an AI, after all that's
| what they sell).
| bbor wrote:
| Ok I'm behind the times in terms of MCP implementation, so would
| appreciate a check: the appeal of this feature is that you can
| pass off the "when to call which MCP endpoint and with what"
| logic to Mistral, rather than implementing it yourself? If so I'm
| not sure I completely understand why I'd want a model-specific,
| remote solution for this rather than a single local library,
| since theoretically this logic should be the same for any given
| LLM/MCP toolset pairing. Just simpler?
|
| It certainly looks easy to implement, I will say that! Docs
| halfway down the page: https://docs.mistral.ai/agents/mcp/
| potatolicious wrote:
| It seems like the main pitch here is auto-inclusion and auto-
| exclusion of various tools via an orchestration agent (which
| may or may not be the main model itself? Unclear from their
| post)
|
| Mostly this seems like an end-run around tool calling
| scalability limits. Model performance degrades heavily if the
| field of possible tools gets too large, so you insert a
| component into the system that figures out what tools _should_
| be in-scope, and make only those available, to get reliability
| higher.
|
| In terms of "why outsource this" it seems like the idea is that
| their orchestration agent would be better than a cruder task
| state machine that you would implement yourself. Time will tell
| if this assertion is true!
| ed wrote:
| > auto-inclusion and auto-exclusion of various tools via an
| orchestration agent
|
| Where do you see that? That would be neat, I'm under the
| impression orchestration is manual though - you define an
| agent and give it the ability to hand off tasks to sub-
| agents.
| htrp wrote:
| is mistral a model company, an agent company, or a enterprise
| software company now?
| nomsters wrote:
| yes
| greenavocado wrote:
| Mistral is trying to be everything at once and it shows. To
| make ends meet they pivoted to selling enterprise software
| through Le Chat and cozying up to Microsoft. Now they're
| throwing around terms like "agentic AI" to stay trendy, even as
| competitors like DeepSeek outperform them in key areas. Their
| identity crisis is obvious. Are they a model company? A
| software vendor? A research lab? At this point, they seem more
| like a startup chasing hype and funding than a company with a
| clear direction. The 6 billion Euro valuation looks impressive,
| but with so many shifts in strategy, you have to wonder if
| they're building something lasting or just riding the AI wave
| until it crashes.
| eigenspace wrote:
| Their strategy doesn't make sense to you because you're
| looking for a technical feature that differentiates them. But
| technical features aren't their key differentiator, geography
| is their key differentiator. They'll get a lot of contracts
| in Europe simply because they're European. Everyone is keenly
| aware of how dependant European tech stacks are on
| increasingly unfriendly foreign powers.
|
| If there's a local European option that does most of what an
| American or Chinese company does, that's simply a safer
| choice.
|
| From this point of view, them trying to do everything at once
| makes a lot of sense. They don't actually need to be the
| absolute best or even the cheapest at any one thing. They
| need to just exist in Europe, be stable, and offer good
| services that people want. Casting a wide net is a better
| strategy for them.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Do they need to pick one? Their offering doesn't seem
| incoherent to me
| brandall10 wrote:
| Couldn't the same questions be asked of OpenAI and Anthropic?
|
| Ultimately these are product/service companies, levering their
| research and innovations as differentiators.
|
| If you're "only a model" company you likely have no moat.
| FailMore wrote:
| Is this basically a LLM that has tools automatically configured
| so I don't have to handle that myself? Or am I not understanding
| it correctly? As in do I just make standard requests , but the
| LLM does more work than normal before sending me a response? Or I
| get the response to every step?
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| The aspirational goal is that the model knows what tools to
| call and when, without human intervention. In practice, you'll
| see varying efficacy with that depending on the tools you need.
| Some of the tool usage is in-distribution / well represented in
| training set, but if you have some custom exotic MCP server you
| created yourself (or pulled off of some random github) you may
| see mixed results. Sometimes that can be fixed by simply
| augmenting your prompt with contrastive examples of how to use
| or not use the tool.
|
| As an aside, my experience with devstral (both via API and
| locally w/ open weights) has been very underwhelming to this
| effect. So I'm curious how this new agent infra performs given
| that observation.
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| It's a software framework for orchestrating agents. Each agent
| can have its own system prompt, its own tools, and it can
| delegate ("hand off") to a different agent. When a hand off
| occurs, the LLM runs again but as a different agent.
| manmal wrote:
| Like Gemini Gems, but agentic?
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Gemini Gems seems to be a ChatGPT "GPTs" equivalent, and I
| never figured out what those actually are. Mistral Agents
| API is like OpenAI Agents SDK.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Gems and GPTs are just a way to customize the system
| prompt from the web UI.
| qwertox wrote:
| The "My MCPs" button looks very promising.
|
| I was looking around at Le Chat, a thing I haven't done in
| months, and I thought that they've really worked on interesting
| stuff in interesting ways.
|
| The ability to enrich either a chat or generally an agent with
| one or more libraries has been solved in a very friendly way. I
| don't think OpenAI nor Anthropic have solved it so well.
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